TransferGo pulls in $2.5 million in seed round

London-based startup TransferGo has announced that they have pulled in $2.5 million in a seed round that includes investment from former Apax Partners investor Mark Ransford, former Kinnevik investor Voria Fattahi, former Travelex CEO Clive Kahn, and former Exponent partner Richard Tudor. Practica Capital, a Lithuanian investment firm, is also participating in the round. TransferGo says that the round, which it claims is the largest at the seed stage for a money-transfer startup, will be put towards expanding the service into countries like Mexico, Japan, and Turkey.

TransferGo operates by offering an alternative to traditional money-transfer services. The startup currently operates in 39 countries (a full list is available on their website) and allows people to send money internationally, taking a fixed fee of 0.99 pounds and a percentage (0.6-1.5%) as an exchange-rate markup. One of the nice aspects of this platform is that you can calculate the costs of sending money between 2 particular countries through a tool on their website. For more information, please check out our previous post on this startup.

What is interesting is that TransferGo was founded by a team of Lithuanians and is based in the British capital, where they compete with the the Estonian-founded TransferWise, which was founded in 2010 and has raised more than $90 million for a similar service. TransferGo entered the market a bit later, launching in 2013, but they have helped customers to transfer more than 100 million pounds and served 100,000 customers, increasing the latter figure at a rate of 20%, month-over-month.